Скачать или смотреть W Daniel Hillis – Why I started making parallel computers (91/248)

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Born in 1956, US inventor, scientist, engineer and visionary W Daniel Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers and co-founded Thinking Machines and Applied Minds, which marked a new era in computing and established Hillis as a computing legend. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes and George Dyson; date recorded: 2016]

TRANSCRIPT: When I was a graduate student I was very interested in making a thinking machine, artificial intelligence. But I knew that the computers that we had available at the time were not nearly powerful enough to do it. So I had to make a computer that was thousands of times more powerful. Actually it turns out I had to make a computer that was millions of times more powerful. But I started by making one thousands of times more powerful. And I knew that, you know, to get neural networks and things we needed much more computing power than we were going to get.

And so that's why I started making parallel computers, was to make a thinking machine with them. So that's why my company was called Thinking Machines. And indeed, eventually, that method did work. It turns out they needed to be even more powerful, but pretty much exactly the methods that we were trying for training computers with neural networks, are pretty much exactly the ones that are working now. And the parallel computers are pretty much exactly like the ones I made. But they just needed to be much faster. So technology had to improve another factor of a thousand before it became possible. But it's interesting how close the ideas are of how that works. Or how they worked, to what we were trying to do then.